Brack: Is the country at a tipping point?

The idiom you’ve probably heard more times than you can count is that hindsight is 20-20, meaning that it may be pretty easy now to see how and why something happened in the past.

For example, looking back, historians and politicians came up with all sorts of high-falutin’ explanations of why the Soviet Union crumbled and the Berlin Wall fell. But in the middle of everything leading up to it, did anyone really see that it would happen so quickly? Not really. Even people like the late Czech writer and leader Vaclav Havel, who opposed the Russian bear for years, were taken by surprise, writes cultural observer Malcolm Gladwell in last year’s “Revenge of the Tipping Point.”

Another of several hindsight examples in the book is gay marriage – which seemed like a mountain for activists to climb for decades until it quickly happened starting around 2012. Gladwell points not to politics, but to a television show as moving the nation toward a tipping point to accepting gay marriage. And he quotes former conservative U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Penn., looking back:

“I was in politics for 16 years and I realized something particularly on the moral and cultural issues,” he said in a speech. “It’s that politics does not shape those issues. Popular culture shapes those issues, particularly the issue of [gay] marriage … When it came to the issue of marriage, and changing the definition of marriage, there was no change. None, zero, for 30 years. And then a television show came on the air called Will & Grace.”

Gladwell’s book also seems to seek to quantify tipping points in several discussions about a concept called the “magic third.”

One example is in elementary education. In general, he writes, studies show when Black kids are a minority in majority White classrooms, they fall behind more and more every year. In first grade, they often are 6% behind their White peers, but just five grades later, they can be 20% behind on testing measures.

But if the percentage of Black kids in classrooms rises to 25% or 30%, scoring differences dramatically shift – and the Black students don’t fall behind. There’s a “magic” number of having other people who look like them that seems to create a dynamic so that the Black students succeed, not fail.

Another example cited – women on corporate boards. When corporate boards grudgingly started to diversify away from all White men, women didn’t really feel their voices were heard or that they made a difference when they were one of nine on a board. Add another and little changed. But if a third woman joined the board, the dynamic shifted. The majority started paying attention and the corporate culture changed, Gladwell writes, because of the magic third.

Such a concept – people being exposed to popular mass culture like a television show about a gay man living with a woman friend or the percentage of kids being in a classroom – is a kind of social engineering.

But it raises interesting questions in today’s partisan, polarized political environment where no one can seem to get along and everything seems volatile: Is it possible that we now are in the middle of a national tipping point on how we want to govern in the future – but we don’t see it because we’re in the middle of it? Is it possible in two or four years that it will all be obvious in hindsight what was going to happen – even though the politicians and pundits seem incapable today of prognosticating our future?

I believe we are inside of a tipping point – and that it could go either way. There are a lot of people who are sick and tired of authoritarian crap infecting the democracy that our forefathers died for. But there are also a lot of people enraged by how they’ve been left out – and they seem to be willing to embrace simplistic, authoritarian solutions and rhetoric at the expense of their liberty.

The next election will tell us a lot – but it’s going to take more than any magic third for things to change.

Andy Brack is editor and publisher of the Charleston City Paper and Statehouse Report. Have a comment? Send to: feedback@statehousereport.com.